primitivism

primitivism. A term employed in the context of 20th-century art to refer to the use by Western artists of forms or imagery derived from the art of so-called primitive peoples, or more broadly to describe an approach in which the artist seeks to express or celebrate elemental forces by using unconventional procedures or techniques that bypass the methods normally associated with the trained painter or sculptor. In the broader sense, the term ‘primitivism’ has been used to embrace such diverse phenomena as child art, naive art (which is sometimes known as primitive art), the art of the mentally ill (see ART BRUT), and Graffiti art. These varied forms of art are linked to each other and to the art of ‘primitive’ peoples by a belief that such ‘innocent’ expression can have a freshness and emotional honesty often lacking in mainstream Western art.

The word ‘primitive’ suggests a lack of sophistication relative to some particular standard. It was once widely used, for example, of pre-Renaissance European painting, especially of the Italian and Netherlandish schools (as in the expression ‘the Flemish primitives'); the Renaissance had established the idea of painting as the imitation of nature that dominated Western art for centuries, so paintings from earlier periods were long found wanting in the representational skills that had become accepted as the norm. This usage of the word ‘primitive’ is now much less common and no longer has derogatory implications. The term ‘primitive art’ is now mainly used to cover the art of societies outside the great Western, Near Eastern, and Asian civilizations, particularly Pre-Columbian art, North American Indian art, African art south of the Sahara, and Oceanic art. Again, the term was once derogatory or patronising, as such art generally seemed uncouth or savage to Western eyes, but it is now used as a label of convenience; as Robert Goldwater wrote in 1955, ‘We all know by now that primitive art is not primitive in any esthetic sense, since we rank its finest achievements with those of the highest of high cultures; nor in any technical sense, since it includes powerful stone carvings and bronze and gold work of great delicacy; and it is often not primitive in any cultural sense, since the societies from which it emerges vary from the simple structures of the interior of New Guinea or the south-western Congo to the complicated feudal organizations of Benin and the civilizations of Central America'.

For centuries, such art was known in the West mainly as colonial booty, and it attracted interest either for its curiosity value or (if made of precious materials) for its monetary worth (in 1520 Albrecht Dürer enthused about Aztec treasures sent to the Emperor Charles V from ‘the new land of gold'). Although the idea of the ‘noble savage’ untainted by European civilization had a vogue in the 18th century, it was not until the 1890s that primitivism made a significant impact on Western art—in the work of Gauguin, who tried to escape ‘the disease of civilization’ among the natives of Tahiti. From about 1905 many other avant-garde artists followed his example in cultivating primitive art as a source of inspiration, finding in it a vitality and sincerity that they thought had been polished out of Western art. Usually they followed Gauguin in spirit rather than body, although Nolde and Pechstein, for example, visited Oceania. Many artists in Paris collected African masks (which could be bought very cheaply in curio shops), among them Derain, Matisse, Picasso, and Vlaminck, and their influence is particularly clear in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (MOMA, New York, 1907), the painting that stands as the fountainhead of Cubism. More generally, the simplification and exaggeration of forms seen in much primitive art were influential on the anti-naturalistic trend of avant-garde art in the period of unprecedented experimentation in the decade before the First World War.

Australian aboriginal art has tended to be excluded from broad discussions of primitivism because it was not until after this key period that it became the subject of serious interest: ‘Despite being one of the longest continuous traditions of art in the world, dating back at least fifty millennia, it remained relatively unknown until the second half of the twentieth century’ ( Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art, 1993). Margaret Preston, in the 1920s, was one of the first to consider Aboriginal art as art, rather than ethnographic material, and she was one of the first non-Aboriginals to be influenced by it in her own work.

Western artists saw examples of primitive art not only in their own and other artists' studios, but also in various public collections. Picasso, for example, visited the Musée d'Ethnographie in Paris, the members of Die Brücke frequented the Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden, and Henry Moore was impressed by the powerful block-like forms of Maya sculpture he saw in the British Museum in London. Moore later said ‘I began to find my own direction, and one thing that helped, I think, was the fact that Mexican sculpture had more excitement for me than negro sculpture. As most of the other sculptors had been moved by negro sculpture, this gave me a feeling that I was striking out on my own.’ In spite of their enthusiasm for such art, few Western artists in the first half of the 20th century had much knowledge of the cultural background of the primitive objects they admired; in line with formalist aesthetics, they believed that visual devices could be transposed from one culture to another without loss of power or meaning. Patrick Heron expressed such an outlook in 1955 when he wrote: ‘The palpable forms, the actual rhythms, the precise manipulations of space—these are the prime realities, the determining factors, the definite features which cause an art to be great or trivial. Even the horror of a stone bowl made for containing twitching human remains, fresh-torn from sacrificial victims, is in a curious way neutralized if the thing is “beautiful”: that is, if it transmits a vital rhythm.’ ( Heron was referring to a Maya ‘Chacmool’ figure, holding an offering bowl, that had inspired Henry Moore.)

Such visual ‘appropriation’ of the culture of ‘primitive’ peoples has sometimes been interpreted as a kind of exploitation, akin to the exploitation or native labour or resources by colonial powers. However, there is evidence that certain modern artists approached primitive art in a spirit that was far from cynical or opportunist. For example, the American art historian Patricia Leighten has argued that there was a close link between Picasso's use of African masks as source material and contemporary anarchist protests against imperialism (‘The White Peril and l'art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism', Art Bulletin, vol. lxxii (1990), pp. 609–30). Similarly, in 1931, the Paris Surrealists used tribal art in their exhibition ‘The Truth about the Colonies', which was a protest against a recently opened official exhibition celebrating the French colonies. See also NEO-PRIMITIVISM.